Book: When Elephants Fly by Nancy Richardson Fischer | My Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Synopsis: There are some battles worth fighting even if it means losing yourself.
T. Lily Decker is a high school senior with a twelve-year plan: avoid stress, drugs, alcohol and boyfriends, and take regular psych quizzes administered by her best friend, Sawyer, to make sure she’s not developing schizophrenia. Genetics are not on Lily’s side. When she was seven, her mother, who had paranoid schizophrenia, tried to kill her. And a secret has revealed that Lily’s odds are even worse than she thought. Still, there’s a chance to avoid triggering the mental health condition, if Lily can live a careful life from ages eighteen to thirty, when schizophrenia most commonly manifests.
But when a newspaper internship results in Lily witnessing a mother elephant try to kill her three-week-old calf, Swifty, Lily can’t abandon the story or the calf. With Swifty in danger of dying from grief, Lily must choose whether to risk everything, including her sanity and a first love, on a desperate road trip to save the calf’s life, perhaps finding her own version of freedom along the way.
My Review: This book was truly amazing and something really special. This is a unique story of a girl named Lily with an increased chance of developing schizophrenia due to her family’s history and her journey with a baby elephant, Swifty. Lily is supposed to be avoiding stressful situations for the next 12 years to hopefully avoid developing schizophrenia, but she is pulled into Swifty’s world and has to decide how she wants to live the rest of her life.
“The calf lay beside me, gazing into my eyes. I had the urge to tell her that there’s a relief when you no longer have to prove to the most important person in your life that you’re worthy.”
I do not have schizophrenia or have proper education on it other than briefly discussing it during my psych class last year, so I looked to see what others have said about this books portrayal of it and it seems that from other reviewers that are more educated about it than me that it is a respectful depiction of the illness.This is not a book that romanticizes mental illness. Personally I feel like I learned a lot about schizophrenia by reading this, which was one of the reasons I wanted to read this book, and am really glad that I read it.
I loved elephants before reading this, but I love them even more now. They are so smart, and not to mention adorable. I already knew how they were abused in circuses but I learned a lot about the species and about what the lives of elephants who are out of the wild are like. I think this will really open a lot of people’s eyes, most importantly YOUNG people’s eyes, and hopefully spark a change in how much we as a society do to protect elephants as well as other endangered species and the treatment of animals in general.
This book was well written, the plot was unique and stands out from the crowd, the characters are memorable, and I think people can learn a lot from this book. This book comes out on September 4th, and I will definitely be buying my own copy of it so I can read it again in the future.
“Crazy is genetic. It’s the house I was born inside. There are no windows, just two locked doors. One leads to Normal, the other to Insanity. At some point, I will inherit a key, but I don’t get to pick which door it unlocks.”
